Friday, July 2, 2010

Summer Immersion Week3--Weiwei

This week I observed two new interesting cases. One is called sentinel lymph biopsy. In this case the patient had melanoma in his right lower leg. However, whether the tumor cells had metastasized through the lymphatic channels into the lymph nodes in his right groin or not was unknown. The doctor dissected the skin of the primary tumor, put some radioactive materials under the skin. The material was transported to the groin by lymphatic channel in minutes. Then the doctor opened the right groin, found the hot spots and got some samples from the hot spots for diagnose in the lab to determine whether they contained tumor cells. This type of operation actually encourages people to further enhance the use of MRI scan or other imaging system, to develop a non-invasive, real-time methods to diagnose cancer metastasis.

The second case has several components, including "Radical Robotic Assisted Cystectomy with total Abdominal Hysterectomy", "Bilateral Salpingo Oophorectomy", "Orthotopic Neobladder". The female patient had bladder cancer. The doctor cut off her uterus, ovary of both sides, bladder, vagina. Then use piece of patient's large intestine to reform a new bladder, though the new bladder won't be contractive or sensible to urination. It was a crazy sever-hour long surgery and with the help of an incredible robot named Da Vinci. It sensed the 3D motion of the surgeon's hand in the control room, recover the motion by it's robotic arm and do fantastic operations. I was fortunate to experience the 3D visualization of the Cystectomy, Hysterectomy and Oophorectomy with 3D glasses.

This week I also put some time in my research project. Mainly dealing with data selection from the RecordTime where vascular surgeons store and update the patients clinical database.

No comments:

Post a Comment